joining me now is rachel semyro or editor of the silicon valley news desk. , rachel. >> hi, scott. >> what were you settg t to do in this year-long project? >> we wanted to find out who were the big players. how do you find that out from a data perspective? you start with the assess's office. one of the l wonderthings about having a multi-newsroom collaboration was we were able to have a team of data reporters from the mercury news, nbc bay area. going into this data, which is pretty messy, li by line, cleaning it up, figuring out who owns the most land. and also who owns the most valule land. >> and so obviously stanford university is the 800-pound gorilla here by far. and how did they acquire so much land? >> well itall started with leland stanford, the ofdad leland jr. who, of course, whom the university is named after. he was one of the original big four railroad rrens, robert from the guilded age. and toin additiopurchasing a beautiful knob hill mansion in san francisco, he also developed the country estate that grew and grew overtime to the point where